


The Sense Of Coming Home

by tielan



Category: Psy-Changeling - Nalini Singh
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 14:10:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2853617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about coming home is that...it’s coming <i>home</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sense Of Coming Home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [empressearwig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/empressearwig/gifts).



The thing about coming home is that...it’s home.

Naya Hunter climbs out of the cab of the truck she picked up from DarkRiver HQ in San Francisco and feels something in her melt at the familiar scents of crisp pine and dark earth. It feels like forever since she ran through these woods.

It _has_ been forever – nearly four years.

She’s changed a lot in that time.

“ _Oh, sweetheart,_ ” her mom said when she saw Naya at HQ. “ _I’m so sorry._ ”

And unspoken were all the things that Naya couldn’t say and didn’t need to – not to her mom. But she held onto her grief and her anger and her loss when her mother would have taken it from her. “ _I_ want _to feel it, right now, mom. I need it to...to keep me sane._ ”

As she hauls her pack out of the passenger seat, Naya reflects that coming here will help. Here there’s no hint of Jason, no memory of his laughter or his anger or his frustration, nothing to remind her of what she’s lost.

“ _It’s not perfect, Nadiya,_ ” her grandmother’s words echoed in her head, perfectly even, perfectly calm. “ _But it’s an option that we must leave open. The kind of madness that plagued us as a race will always exist; and while we have ways to control it, to train it, so, too, must we have an exit for those who reach the end of their capabilities._ ”

There were moments when, family aside, Naya hates her grandmother with her perfectly-maintained observation of the protocols even twenty years after Silence fell. Maybe she hates it all the more, because something in her knows that her grandmother is right.

And this isn’t like the darkest days of the Council – rehabilitation orders, forced reconditioning, and people who were erased from existence for being less than perfect Psy. At least Jason made the choice himself, in full knowledge of what it would bring, knowing what he would become.

“ _Don’t come back and visit me, Naya,_ ” Jason said in one of his lucid moments. “ _I’d like...I’d like to be remembered as I was, not as I will be._ ”

Naya disobeyed him, though. She had to see. But the man sitting quietly in the padded room never even looked up at her.

Movement under the pine boughs now – a sleek leopard slinking out of the scrub from one side of the trail to the house, his tail flicking idly in the air as it pauses in the crisp morning air.

Naya shoulders her pack and walks towards it, recognising the markings on the beast, knowing exactly who was here to greet her.

“Hello, Jules.”

He shifts in a shimmer of light and colour – the exquisite beauty of a Changeling going from human to animal – and becomes a tall lean man, dark-haired and handsome enough to set hearts racing with nothing more than a smile, and a glance from those big blue eyes under long long lashes.

Jules Ryder tilts his head at her. “I don’t think we’ve actually met. Do I know you?”

“Jules!”

He smiles then, a bright grin. “You’ve all grown up, Naya.”

“That’s what people do when they’re away four years, Jules.” Naya manages to sound dry, although her heart is pounding. Something isn’t quite right with Jules. When she left Dark River territory four years ago, he and Roman were complete pests while she was trying to leave – coming and asking her ridiculous questions, poking through her things, and insisting on carrying her bags. Like a pair of older brothers who couldn’t forbear from teasing her.

That’s what they’ve always been.

But now? The man who smiles at her from mere yards away is someone else – someone Naya doesn’t quite feel she knew well enough to hug. Which is crazy, right? Because this is Jules, and she’s known him all her life.

Jules is shaking his head as he steps closer. “I didn’t mean physically,” he says gently in the deep, quiet voice that’s always soothed her. “I meant in your eyes.”

Naya looks into his eyes – beautiful blue – and finds it hard to breathe. But she manages to gather her thoughts enough to say, “Well, you know, life happens.”

She doesn't intend for it to come out quite so bitterly, but it does. And she expects a light comment about how she's changed, how this bitterness and anger isn't _her_ , but Jules surprises her. He always has.

“I do know,” he says, and there’s a note of regret now in his own voice, in the shadows of his gaze, before it softens, and he opens his arms in welcome. And Naya steps into his embrace without hesitation, because _there’s_ the Jules she was expecting to see when she came home.

And the feeling of home is everything in his voice as he bends his head against hers, and murmurs, “Oh, Naya. Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm afraid this is just the start of what I imagine to be a bigger story. I started writing this with 45 minutes to go before Yuletide Madness closed, and so I didn't have the time to get a full novelette out.
> 
> No guarantees that this will be finished, either. I haven't had much luck with finishing my Psy-Changeling stories.


End file.
